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Students welcomed the opportunity to escape classroom routine with picnics, shopping excursions and class trips to Louisville or Nashville.  A regular feature of each school year was a trip to Mammoth Cave.  Between twenty and forty Potter students and their chaperones would board the morning train for Glasgow Junction where another train would carry them the remaining few miles to lunch at the Mammoth Cave Hotel.  Before entering the Cave, the girls posed for the customary pre-descent photograph–suffering some embarrassment since they had by now changed into their gym suits for the tour.  The long underground hike, which included dinner eaten in one of the caverns, did not end until late evening.  After a night spent at the hotel the girls would return the next day for a different tour before boarding the afternoon train back to Bowling Green.

Back at the college, the girls participated in sports, played games--the card game "flinch" was all the rage in the early 1900s--gave holiday parties and sorority entertainments, attended lectures and other college-sponsored social events, and held “germans,” school dances which often saw half of the student body playing the role of male escorts, complete with masculinized names.

Like boarders everywhere, students often found institutional food to be monotonous and unsatisfying.  To compensate, they spent much of their leisure time planning and executing "midnight feasts."  The feasting hour did not begin until after ten o’clock, when the girls were in their rooms for the night.  A blanket or quilt would be suspended from hooks over the door frame to block light emanating from underneath.  Standing on a chair and holding a pan over the gas jet, the girls would prepare fudge, taffy or Welsh rarebit.  Sometimes the smell of cooking or the smoke from burned candy would bring a teacher to the door and prompt a frantic dousing of lights and concealing of dishes.  Even if a feast went undiscovered, the size of the gas bill betrayed the girls and caused President Cabell, in their words, to "kick up no end of a row."

Even more elaborate feasts would be planned for closer to midnight.  At a prearranged time doors opened and girls would tiptoe to the third-floor gymnasium carrying candles and provisions: candy, cream, chafing dish ingredients, oranges, apples, olives, bread, sardines, grape juice and, if luck would have it, "enough chicken salad to feed a regiment."  On a well-remembered night in January 1907, no less than twenty-three girls had taken up their stations in rooms on the third floor.  As the appointed hour drew near, however, familiar footsteps sounded in the hall.  Illegal lights "went off in a flash" but, upon gaining admittance to one of the rooms, the lady principal and matron promptly quashed the plans of "the twenty-three."  The yearbook nevertheless immortalized the feast-that-never-was, devoting a page to the "23 Skidoo Club" with its appointed cooks, sandwich spreaders, can openers and candle bearers.

- Mammoth Cave, nd

- German Club, 1898

Drawing of student making fudge.

- Tin Can Club

- 23 Skidoo Club drawing